Colorblind" Visibility, and the Narrative Marginalization of Black Female Protagonists in Mainstream Fantasy Media

BUT WE DREAM IN THE DARK FOR THE MOST PART: FANTASIES OF RACE, "COLORBLIND" VISIBILITY, AND THE NARRATIVE MARGINALIZATION OF BLACK FEMALE PROTAGONISTS IN MAINSTREAM FANTASY MEDIA A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts in English By Bezawit Elsabet Yohannes, B.A. Washington, D.C. March 23, 2020 Copyright 2020 by Bezawit Elsabet Yohannes All Rights Reserved ii BUT WE DREAM IN THE DARK FOR THE MOST PART: FANTASIES OF RACE, "COLORBLIND" VISIBILITY, AND THE NARRATIVE MARGINALIZATION OF BLACK FEMALE PROTAGONISTS IN MAINSTREAM FANTASY MEDIA Bezawit Elsabet Yohannes, B.A. Thesis Advisor: Angelyn L. Mitchell, Ph.D. ABSTRACT Fantastic stories offer new ways of dreaming, yet even in magical worlds race remains the “unspeakable thing unspoken.” My project analyzes the racialization of Black female characters positioned as protagonists in early 2000s mainstream fantasy media, looking primarily at Gwen from BBC’s Merlin, Tiana from Disney’s Princess and the Frog, and Cinderella from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella. By only incorporating Black female actors through “colorblind” casting, writers and producers make Black female characters visible but fail to incorporate the necessary cultural specificity of representation. Consequently, the adaptation of fantasies defined by white cultural values resist the new centrality of the “Dark Other” and instead re-inscribe oppressions of the racial past. These supposedly colorblind narratives of “worlds-that-never-were” cannot divorce historical settings and archetypes from their temporal connotations when applied to a Black female protagonist. In the “rags to riches” stories I analyze, the presence of a Black princess unsettles but cannot overcome race-d, gendered, and class-ed tropes linked to white femininity and the depiction of the princess. I argue that Gwen, Tiana, and Cinderella are still intersectionally marginalized within “colorblind” mythologies, even if not explicitly and not only due to skin color. These narratives then set up real Black girl audiences to dream of a world that has to ignore their embodied difference in order to include them. iii With this thesis, I close one chapter in my continuing journey towards fearlessly embracing the fullness of my identity. Thank you to the family and friends who gave me the support and love that I needed to get here. And thank you to Toni Morrison, who taught me to play in the dark, because being a Black woman does not limit my imagination; it expands it. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................................... 1 I. Fantasy, “Colorblindness,” and Unspeakable Things Unspoken ......................................... 1 II. The Paradox of Colorblind Visibility and the Narrative Need for Blackness ..................... 9 WATCHING RACE IN A LAND OF MYTH AND A TIME OF MAGIC: INSCRIBING THE MARGINALIZATION OF GWEN IN BBC’S MERLIN .......................................................... 17 I. Racial Temporalities, Multiculturalism and Intersectionality ............................................ 17 II. All’s Not Fair in Love and Servanthood: Desirability and the Princess Archetype ........... 26 III. “I Have Dreamed the Future and In It That Servant Sits Upon My Throne”: White Supremacy, Fear, and Trauma in Gwen and Morgana’s Racial Power Dynamic ................... 32 DIG A LITTLE DEEPER: FANTASIES OF RACIAL HISTORY AND THE MYTHOS OF THE DISNEY PRINCESS IN DISNEY’S THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG ......................... 39 I. “Almost There”: An Intersectional Analysis of Hard Work and Happy Endings ............... 39 II. The Princess Frog? Animality and the Racial Masquerade of Princesshood ..................... 48 III. Love Is (Color) Blind: The Pedagogy of Racial Liminality in Naveen and Tiana’s “Happily Ever After” ............................................................................................................ 59 DREAMING THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM OF A BLACK PRINCESS: ANALYZING THE NARRATIVE AND META-NARRATIVE OF COLOR AND RACE IN RODGERS AND HAMMERSTEIN’S CINDERELLA (1997) ............................................................................... 64 I. Creating the Contradiction: Behind the Scenes of a “Colorblind” Multiracial Production ............................................................................................................................ 64 II. “Underneath You’ll Still Be Common”: The Racial Unconscious and Interracial Dynamics in Cinderella’s Family .......................................................................................................... 70 III. “In My Own Little Corner” and “The Stepsisters’ Lament”: Deconstructing the Desirability of a Black Princess ............................................................................................ 74 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................ 81 BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................................... 83 v INTRODUCTION I. Fantasy, “Colorblindness,” and Unspeakable Things Unspoken My passion for literature and narrative is inseparable from my love for the fantasy genre. The first chapter book I remember reading was The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis; I was drawn in by the promise of the limitless worlds that an author could bring to life. I constantly sought to stretch the farthest limits of my imagination; to imagine dragons, fairies, talking animals — all things I knew did not exist and many for which I had no reference. I knew that the “real world” had no fantastic creatures or otherworldly guardians, and there were no magical solutions for everyday problems. Still, I kept reaching for new realities, or at least new reimaginings of reality. As Ebony Elizabeth Thomas expresses in the introduction to her book The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games, “I was warned against walking through metaphoric looking glasses, trained to be suspicious of magic rings, and assured that no gallant princes were ever coming to my rescue … and yet I was most drawn to those magical stories, for I longed to dream” (Thomas 1).1 I have come to understand that my love for fantasy was inexorably tied to my coming of age, although I did not have the language to express it then. My immigrant parents had sacrificed to make sure I lived in a nice neighborhood, went to a good private school, and had every chance to assimilate. My not feeling “different” was meant to be empowering, so that I could thrive in primarily white spaces. Nevertheless, from a young age I still felt inexplicably ill at ease among both my white peers and my extended family who had chosen not to assimilate to the same extent. Not having the vocabulary for my own difference did not lessen the impact of that 1 Thomas, Ebony Elizabeth. The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games. NYU Press, 2019. 1 difference. This social discomfort led to my finding solace in the media that I could consume instead of dealing with lunch table dynamics and family reunions. Rosemary Jackson’s Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion explains that “fantasy characteristically attempts to compensate for a lack resulting in cultural constraints; it is a literature of desire, which seeks that which is experienced as absence or loss” (Jackson qtd. in Schanoes 236-237).2 These stories were not just escapist; they were the means by which I tried to visualize my own self-actualization. Fantasy was the literature of desire, of dreaming. The shy kids in fantasy were always the “chosen ones,” which was the closest I could get to validation for my alienation. Still, I continued to feel invisible: unable to see myself or to be seen. The mainstream fantasy stories I grew up with, both as movies and as books — like The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and A Wrinkle in Time3 — only further reinforced my invisibility. I internalized the fact that even these wildly magical alternate worlds were fundamentally conservative and consistently excluded characters, let alone protagonists, who looked like me. In these stories, the princess and/or protagonist was depicted as “fair”: blonde or brunette, slender, and white. I willed myself into the narratives without consciously acknowledging the ways in which my identity was not welcome in these worlds, telling myself that I was relating to characteristics “beyond” skin color: cleverness, shyness, bravery, ambition. But subconsciously, my imagination had learned its boundaries: “Although a sense of infinite possibilities inherent in fantasy, science fiction, comics, and other imaginative genres draws children, teens, and adults from all backgrounds to speculative fiction, not all 2 Schanoes, Veronica. “Historical Fantasy.” The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature. James, Edward, and Farah Mendlesohn, eds. Cambridge University Press, 2012. 3 This is not to say that there were not Black authors writing fantasy at the same time as these stories, but unless a concentrated effort was made to find those stories, they were not easily accessible in the mainstream. At the time I had been taught not to focus on difference and consequently, not to look for those stories.

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